


Somewhere Deeper Than the Flames

by DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered



Series: Several General Danvers AUs in Tiny Hors D'oeuvre Form [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 02:00:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19219306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered/pseuds/DangersUntoldHardshipsUnnumbered
Summary: Star Wars AU in which Jedi Master Astra and her padawan, Alex, flirt with disaster.





	Somewhere Deeper Than the Flames

This desert cave on Yassava was starting grow chilly. As the three suns set, the warmth of the desert went with it. The gold sands turned to red, and then to purple.

Astra knelt down, the sleeves of her brown robes tied back, and she lit a fire from the husks of desert scrub brush that she had wisely been collecting as they trekked across the sands toward the remote Culgutt village in the bluffs. Alex watched her in the gathering dim, until the flames spilled up against the roof of their cave and threw her master’s face into dramatic shadow, turning her into a figure of light and dark, black and gold. Astra then sat cross-legged near the crackling flames and closed her eyes, seeming to ignore her padawan’s presence, the highlight and shadows of the complicated braid that ran down her back fascinating Alex’s eyes.

Alex, feeling suddenly guilty at her laziness, scrambled out of her reclining pose and assumed a meditative posture too.But her eyes remained open. Master Astra In-Ze was beautiful when she closed her eyes and entered into communion with the Force; she was a particularly serene and luminous presence. Alex watched for a few minutes. She couldn’t help it.

“You won’t get much meditation done if you don’t close your eyes,” her master scolded, but her tone was gentle.

“Sorry, Master.”

Alex closed her eyes.

In her mind’s eye, though, was not the beautiful emptiness of the Force. Or at least, not only that. In her mind’s eye was her Master, her fearsome grace illuminated in the purple glow of her light saber. Her Master, wrapping her up in the power of the Force when she was wild and angry, and holding her there.Her Master, teaching her to tame the Dark Side whose edge she felt born to dance along.The Force was present. It soothed and bound them in the flickering light.

But something else was present. Neither dark side nor light. Just human. It warmed her somewhere deeper than the flames could do. She sat, dwelling in it.

 _Master?_ she kept her eyes closed, reaching out to her through spirit, rather than across the fire.

 _Yes, Alex._ She answered through spirit.

_Master Shakti says you never took a padawan before me._

_That’s so._

_Why me, then?_

Astra opened her eyes and gazed into the fire. _Nobody before you was an appropriate choice._

Alex did not come from Jedi lineage.Astra had found her in an alley in Mos Dendin, wild-eyed in a pouring rain, fending off five drunk mercenaries with a trash bin lid and the most unpredictable –but incredibly strong– force powers that Astra said she had ever seen.Astra intervened, picking up the five with the Force and throwing them several feet into a chute that probably led somewhere foul. Alex, still hysterical and afraid, tried to throw Astra, but Astra, being far stronger and more disciplined, gathered Alex in a Force hold that folded her powers back into her body, and stood there, patiently, sternly looking at her until she gathered her emotions enough to listen.

“I am not your enemy,” Astra had explained impatiently.

And Alex had believed her.

“You mean you could only train someone who was already such a disaster the Council didn’t care if you failed?” Alex teased her.She too gazed into the dancing flames, not looking at her Master.

Astra’s lips twitched a little. “As a disaster myself, they could hardly give me one of the younglings straight from the creche.”

Alex felt that human feeling welling up inside her. She laughed. “Master Disaster.”

Astra rarely smiled, but Alex could sense, or could see in her periphery, that her lips were curled in a faint representation of one. But the mood waned after a moment, and she turned and looked at Alex, and the reach of her gaze seemed to plumb the sandy, swirling, cloudy bottom of her soul. “You were powerful, and your heart was righteous. But you were never raised with discipline. You had anger and fear, and those things are paths to the Dark Side.”

Alex looked down at her own hands, folded in her lap.

“I am the Jedi that almost wasn’t,” Astra continued. “My pride, anger and fear nearly kept Master Kenobi from allowing me to be trained. My circumstance was different, but my path led to much the same place as yours. No other Master would be so well suited to teaching you.”

Alex considered this a long time. The flush in her cheeks moved to her chest, a glow that mirrored the fire before her.There was little point to telling her Master that she was everything in the world to her now. Astra would reject that, because it was not proper teaching, and Astra, though she was roguish in her ways at times, tried to at least teach Alex what she was _supposed_ to know. _I am not the world to you,_ she would correct her, _I am one with the Force, and the Force is with you, and with me, and you are one with the Force, and we are part of everything._

Alex knew she would say exactly that.She looked at her Master’s face now, feeling a momentary boldness that she knew would probably regret later. “Why, again, are Jedi forbidden to love?”

Astra was wise to her mischief. “It is taught that we are to live and represent the Light.We are encouraged toward benevolence. But lovers are a vulnerability that a Jedi cannot afford. A Force sensitive person having their heart broken is a very dangerous thing.”

Alex looked at her a long time before answering. Impetuously, she lifted her hand, and sent little tendrils, little fingers of Force power across the space between them, and with these, she unbound her Master’s hair and held its waves, glorious, suspended around her face as if in a breeze, all lit with mellow golden fire that danced. Astra meant star, and a star was a sun, and the sun was a light around which all things revolved and Alex, so long as she could, would revolve around Astra.

And then she released it, and Astra’s hair settled down onto her shoulders. In her Master’s eyes, she saw a gentle, unmistakable longing.

That was it. That human feeling in Alex’s chest, that warmth that was neither light nor dark. Longing.


End file.
